Exactly twenty years ago, on June 23, 1988, James E. Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies testified to a Senate committee that he could state with “99 percent confidence” that a recent, persistent rise in global temperature was occurring, and had long been expected. That landmark statement, and the dawn of the global warming discussion, was covered by Andy Revkin, then a DISCOVER senior editor and now an environmental reporter for The New York Times. (More discussion of Hansen’s testimony can be found on Revkin’s blog.) Revkin kindly agreed to take our questions about his piece.
Q: How, if at all, were the 1988 predictions wrong?
A: Not much was really wrong. The range of warming projected—a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations from the preindustrial norm—remains similar today.
The things that were uncertain in 1988 remain uncertain now, including the mix of warming and cooling influences in clouds. As Steve Schneider, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado—who is still a frequent source of mine—put it in 1988:
“Clouds are an important factor about which little is known… When I first started looking at this in 1972, we didn’t know much about the feedback from clouds. We don’t know any more now than we did then.”
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Climate activists and consumers alike have been buzzing about an entrepreneur who has created a system for producing ethanol in your own backyard. But questions remain as to whether the device, or others like it, can ever be commercially successful. Part of the problem, Times writer Michael Fitzgerald points out, is that it’s illegal in the United States to operate a car on 100 percent ethanol.
Given that the government has gone to so much trouble to make sure ethanol is produced en masse, it seems odd that it would keep a law on the books that outlaws using a pure version of it as fuel. Flexible-fuel cars in the U.S. run on an 85 percent ethanol/15 percent gas ratio. In fact, it’s illegal to purchase 100 percent ethanol without a government-issued license.
Meanwhile, running cars on 100 percent ethanol is not only possible, it’s done frequently. The Indy 500 has begun running all its cars on pure ethanol, while nearly half the cars in Brazil do the same.
So why the balk on pure ethanol in the U.S.? The answer lies in the cars.
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Fossil Fuels
Despite all the furor over alternative energy sources, fossil fuels continue to power our lives. Yes, oil is starting to dwindle in supply, but we could always drill for the stuff in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge … and save ourselves a buck per barrel 20 years from now. And global reserves of coal—recently thought to be enough to last for centuries at current levels of production—might actually be significantly lower: “peak coal” could apparently sneak up on us pretty fast.
Luckily, scientists have been hard at work searching for ways to mitigate the global warming impact of fossil fuels, such as carbon dioxide storing technology at coal plants—though you may not want to hold your breath for the “clean coal” movement.
Biofuels
Instead of using petroleum, which is imported, pollution-causing, and slowly disappearing, why not simply power your car with plants of all shapes and sizes? But when something sounds too good to be true, it often is, and our favorite new fuel alternative may wind up being a damaging and waste-producing dud—and one that’s winning us no friends in the international arena.
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